INNER CHRISTIANITY - Going beyond the literal in religion

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TWO KINDS OF RELIGION

The Inner Christianity which, not long before the division of the Roman empire into Eastern and Western empires, was adopted by the Roman Emperor Constantine as the state religion, was then very different in nature and doctrine from modern Western Christianity. It was intended to heal both individual and society, and it is possible to conjecture, from his actions at the time and after, that Constantine himself appears to have understood the two things to be related. Certainly he understood that Christianity was a faith that fitted into a category of Greek thought quite different from that or previous state religions.
Up to that time, the official religions of the Roman empire all appear to have existed primarily or entirely for political reasons, so that this introduction of a different kind of religion, one that offered as a state religion a faith that was in agreement with the by then large articulate element of the population that was aware of and often understood Greek philosophical thought, was a major innovation in the Roman state, even looked at in this simplistic way. Evidence suggest that it was brought into being to correct social problems caused in part by the lack of popular acceptance of previous imperial religious impositions. In simple terms, it is difficult to get people to believe in a different divinity every time there is a change of regime; in the period almost immediately before Constantine's succession, the Empire had supported and to varying degrees enforced religious practices based on regarding the Emperor as a god or as the son of a god. By the time of Diocletian, in particular, this pattern appears to have become too obvious; previously devout authorities were beginning to write openly that the emperor was enforcing religious affirmation of his divine status simply for political reasons. Lactantius, one of Constantine’s advisors, recommended Christianity to the empire almost entirely for such political reasons. Lactantius, a lawyer by trade, had previously been one of the main supporters of the idea of state religion, so his opposition to the cult of Diocletian supports other evidence that that emperor’s self-promotion was by then clearly unacceptable to many people of that time, perhaps because the understanding of Greek thought was by then so widespread in the Empire that classical Greek concepts from before the time of Christ -- for example the idea of a single 'unknown' God as described in Saint Paul's conversation with the Athenians (REF??), were well enough understood and -- it is clear -- widely enough accepted by informed people to bring the deification of a living man into question and, in doing so, to threaten the stability of the Roman state, just as the insistence of Charles First of England on the 'divine right of kings' was one of the elements that led to his overthrow more than a thousand years later.
Less obvious, but certainly present in fact, whether or not Constantine was fully aware of it, was the therapeutic stream by which the Christianity of those times, persecuted for its unwillingness to accept the strictures of

   state religion, played a key role in the transformation of the psyche. This 'religious cure' for human ills was a form of spiritual transformation that was then practiced by monks, hermits and by numbers of lay people. It involved self-knowledge; this was developed and taken further by traditional forms of prayer and other practices that changed the psyche by direct or indirect means; the experiences these changes brought also led to a change -- experiential and not merely verbal -- in the way its practitioners understood the world.

To understand Constantine's action and its effects on the Roman state, we have to understand this as revealing the existence in human history of two entirely different forms of religion. Both may serve as a means of maintaining good order within nations, communities, and groups of people, but the two forms of religion do this in very different ways. One is simply imposed on people; it is actually created or sustained by those in authority primarily for the reason of reinforcing their control; it does not clearly and directly serve the people whom it leads. The other arises from within the communities in which it acts, often but not necessarily among those not overly impressed by political authority; at its best it does not need to be enforced, for it is sustained by the fact that it serves its congregation by feeding the needs of their psyches; it develops their faculties, integrates them, and allows and assists the development within them of greater maturity; its truth is therefore confirmed by individual experience.
But in Constantine's time Christianity was one church, administratively divided into semi-autonomous patriarchates, each in communion one with another; most of those patriarchates still use almost identical liturgies and agree on almost all key elements of doctrine to this day; in the English speaking world we do not so easily understand how the Christianity of Constantine's era, created to bring stability, was later repeatedly fragmented to become the multi-denominational church of modern times; but this lack of understanding is found in large part in our lack of knowledge of the broader sweep of Christian history; if we knew what had happened, we would have at least some idea of why it had happened. The fact is that the churches in which the theology and liturgical rule were greatly changed during periods of political change are also the churches which have continued to fragment and have become parents by now to thousands of denominations.